Black Perspectives: The Anti-Black City

An interview with Jaime Amparo Alves.

The Anti-Black City (Jaime Amparo Alves)The Anti-Black City is based on my personal experience as a Black man coming of age in a highly violent favela in São Paulo. Back in the 1990s, I was a teenager coming from the northeastern state of Bahia to work in the house of an Italian family as a gardener. My experience as a domestic worker and later as a favelado taught me a great deal about racial injustices and about what Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire refers to as “pedagogy of anger.” My book relies on memories from these troubling times and on activism with mothers of Black youth killed by the police in the last ten years. The main question that I dealt with was how to create possibilities for Black urban life in a context saturated by police terror and everyday structural violence.

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Published in: Black Perspectives
By: Keisha N. Blain